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Sunday, 19 July 2015

On and off from here on I will be contributing articles to the gaming blog 'Creative Twilight', as well as posting here, and to make sure you done miss out on those articles, I'll be linking to them from my Eternal Wargamer blog page. Topics like my Sprue Cutters Union posts will continue to appear in their entirety here, but it is nice to be able to do something collaborative alongside other gamers.

Wednesday, 15 July 2015

After something of a roller coaster ride of a half year or so, the Sprue Cutters Union is back and hopefully better than ever. I will certainly be doing my utmost to post on every topic, as I have always thought that this is a great venture, and one that I am proud to be a part of.

The new format will be that each Sprue Cutter will post up their views on the topic of the month as usual, but now they will be gathered together at the end of each month and made available via the Combat Workshop Facebook Page. No more listing of links to other blog posts at the bottom of the page. And to go with a fresh new start to the Union, how about a cool new logo?!

So, without further ado, this month's post is something of a remake of the classic Sprue Cutters Union topic...Must Stash!

Why do we accumulate a stash of unbuilt and 'potentially-never-will-be-built' kits?

OK then, we may have a new logo and a new Facebook outlet for our blogs thanks to Jon over at the Combat Workshop, but some things will never change: I will always being tackling the topic of the month from a wargaming perspective. Well, that isn't entirely true, some things change, because first time around of discussing this subject, my stash consisted of a single 'Solar Powered Construction Kit', which has nothing whatsoever to do with my hobby.

Alright, since you ask, I'll tell you what happened. Really, two things happened. The first, like many of us I am sure, and a contributing factor to the absence of the Union this year, is that work went crazy. Or should I say 'more crazy', because work for me has been a challenge for about a year now. I guess that's what happens when you are in it at the pointy end, with a hundred emails a day flying at you and nowhere to run.

The other occurrence was that I made a certain 'hobby resolution' at the onset of 2015, which you may or may not recall was to finish off to a 'tabletop' standard two hundred and fifty gaming miniatures by the twelfth chime of Big Ben on December 31st 2015.

Now then, this painting promise resulted in a flying start to the year, and up to this point I have just upped my total for 2015 to 160 miniatures done and ready to fight. Given that during the whole of 2014 I managed around a third of that number, I think that I have done rather well. The target is twenty per calendar month, and I aim to be averaging twenty five per month come the end of July. I am really aiming for the big Three Hundred by the end of the year if I can.

The unfortunate side effect of all this painting is that it is eating up the vast majority of my hobby time, and as the 'big things' like vehicles are a comparatively minor part of my collection (only about twenty or so tanks), with the vast bulk being made up of various hundreds of infantry and cavalry models, the armour and flyers have found themselves at the bottom of the 'to do' list. Opening stash means 'cutting sprues', filing and scraping components, and assembly, none of which involves a paint brush, and if I plan to hit my targets for the year, the acrylic has to flow like Income Tax out of my wages.

So there we have it. In the previous iteration of this post, I had said that as a gamer first and modeller/painter second, my focus would always be on assembly and game play and painting models would come in its own good time. Having seen just how many unpainted miniatures I own and committed to doing something about it, that focus has shifted considerably. In fact it's a wonder I have time to be typing this post.

It's a good job really that I don't consider all my unpainted miniatures as stash, because it will take in the region of five years to get it all painted at a rate of 250-300 per year. All I need to do is avoid building up a collection of new models to add to the pile...Doh!!!

For the first time in what feels like an age, thanks for reading.

P.S. I have signed up to write some gaming based articles for the Creative Twilight blog, and I will link those back to this page, so I invite you to keep a look out for some tabletop delving from me soon.